The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to review a challenge to local gun restrictions in a Chicago suburb, leaving in place a ban on assault weapons in Highland Park, Ill.
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The city’s assault weapons ban was upheld by the appeals court in a 2-1 decision.
The Supreme Court, by declining to step in, sent a message that it is not going to dive into the current gun debate right now. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons. Judge Frank Easterbrook said the courts should defer to city and state officials who seek to protect the public’s safety.
Gun rights advocates have been attempting repeatedly over the past five years to get the Supreme Court to return to the issue, complaining with increasing fervor that lower courts are not respecting Second Amendment rights, and, indeed, are engaging in what some advocates have called “massive resistance” to the court’s decisions.
The question is particularly heated after recent mass shootings.
It was mere coincidence that, just days after that incident, the Justices would again refuse to get involved. In the case McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010, the court expanded the ruling to the states. It also prohibits guns with fixed magazine capacities of more than 15 rounds, as well as guns that can be converted into assault firearms. “It also concluded, however, that it was “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun crime, ‘ and its overall effects were ‘still unfolding” when the law expired”.
Similar bans are on the books in California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut and Hawaii, and none have been struck down, so the justices had no legal conflict to resolve. “What the 7th Circuit said in our case is that firearms that constitute a clear danger or uncommon usage of self-defense are not protected”. We have a good foundation for successful Second Amendment advocacy.
FILE – The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that Americans have a constitutional right to keep guns in their homes for self-defense.
The Highland Park ordinance followed the passage of a controversial IL state law that allowed gun owners to legally carry concealed weapons.
Several reasons appear to provide at least partial explanations.
But Chuck Michel, a Long Beach, Calif., lawyer and president of the California Rifle & Pistol Association, said he still wants to see a formal ruling from the high court on the reach of the Second Amendment.
The justices have shied from weighing in on state and local disputes on gun rights in recent years.
Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t having second thoughts, and he explained why he wanted to overturn the ban in a six-page dissent joined by Justice Antonin Scalia. Only Justices Thomas and Scalia spoke out in opposition. “It’s important to remember that the Supreme Court has regularly maintained that a denial is not an affirmation of a lower court’s ruling”.
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The justices left intact a federal appeals court decision that said the Highland Park, Illinois, restrictions don’t infringe on the constitutional right to bear arms.
